Liberty Blackout Brief Evening Edition

A Deeper Take on Today’s News

“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…” – the old spiritual plays like a bent note across today’s news.

Take Maine’s Senate race. Marine veteran Graham Platner, a Democrat, just revealed he’s covered up a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest after learning it was an infamous Nazi Totenkopf emblem . Platner insists he never knew its meaning – yet for 20 years no one questioned it, even as he passed military background checks. Now he’s apologizing not only for the tattoo but also for past online posts dismissing sexual assault and stereotyping Black patrons, written during a post-Army spiral . The scandal has upended a high-stakes campaign and raised an uneasy question: how could a symbol of hate ride quietly on a would-be U.S. senator’s skin for so long? The answer, perhaps, lies in the blind spots America allows itself – the things we don’t see or don’t want to see.

This story is a small window into a larger truth. In the very week Platner scrambled to prove “I’m not a secret Nazi,” a data report dropped a reality check on our national self-image. The National Urban League’s new State of Black America study finds Black people still have only 73.9% of the overall well-being that white Americans enjoy – a figure virtually unchanged for two decades. Economic and health gains have barely moved the needle, while gaps in education, justice and civic participation have widened since 2005 . Even in a banner year for new lawyers, where 2024 graduates saw record hiring, white J.D. grads were far more likely to land jobs than Black grads (94.7% vs 89.7%), and the disparity in high-prestige law jobs actually grew . Now, under political pressure, top firms are even backpedaling on diversity efforts – scrubbing mentions of DEI from their websites . In plain terms, the American promise remains a promise unkept: separate and unequal, by the numbers.

And as national leaders bicker in Washington, those inequalities hit home. In Baltimore, the federal shutdown (now entering its third week) has left hundreds of families scrambling for food. At a West Baltimore church pantry, Reverend Andre Samuel has seen daily demand surge from about 75 people to well over 100 since paychecks stopped . Many are furloughed federal workers or their kids – the very folks who “built the Black middle class” in Maryland, now lining up for canned goods. “They don’t care that people can’t feed their families,” Baltimore’s mayor fumed about the politicians in D.C. . Volunteers rush to restock shelves so no one is turned away. This local crisis barely made national headlines, but its message is loud: when America catches a cold, Black communities get pneumonia. When the paychecks pause, it is Black working moms and dads who skip meals to keep the kids fed.

Meanwhile, other stories today sketch a pattern of power playing in the shadows. In Indiana, legislators of the Black Caucus are sounding the alarm over an audacious, mid-decade redistricting push. “Unprecedented in Indiana,” one lawmaker said – a scheme openly backed by a former president to redraw congressional maps years early . The fear? That it will “silence voters, especially in communities of color,” by cracking apart minority neighborhoods or packing them into one district to dilute their influence . Democracy is at stake on the color line, yet this gambit marches forward with little outcry beyond the state. And down on the Gulf Coast, a little-noticed lawsuit is trying to halt an under-the-radar environmental rollback. In one of its many proclamations, the Trump administration quietly exempted 50 chemical plants – some of the nation’s worst polluters – from new rules on cancer-causing emissions . That move delays crucial EPA safety standards by two more years, a “carve-out” that endangers predominantly Black and low-income fenceline communities in at least 13 states, from Louisiana to Illinois . “Delaying them is a policy choice with a human cost, measured in diagnoses, not dollars,” one advocate said, pointing to towns like Mossville, LA – emblematic of Black communities breathing toxic air for generations .

And what of the federal government sworn to protect civil rights? An investigative report reveals an alarming build-up of a shadow police force under Homeland Security. Across U.S. cities, residents have witnessed masked men in tactical gear ambushing people at courthouses and on the street, throwing them into unmarked vans. It sounds like a fever dream – but it’s real. These men are ICE agents, operating with near-total anonymity on direct orders from the highest levels . They’ve been arresting immigrants with such aggression and secrecy that even veteran DHS officials are aghast. One former oversight official got “goosebumps” describing what he’s seen: people grabbed outside their immigration hearings and whisked away to distant jails, even “disappearing… to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture” . Under Trump’s watch, the guardrails that once checked such abuses – the civil rights offices, the ombudsmen – have been dismantled or gutted . The result is an ICE that some compare to “the world’s most repressive regimes,” an unfettered national police force targeting the vulnerable . It’s the kind of story that should stop the nation cold – secretive federal agents, no badges, no accountability – yet it’s largely flying below the radar, dismissed as someone else’s problem. Until, of course, the knock comes on the wrong door.

Even at the local level, choices are being made that carry an eerie weight. In Aurora, Colorado, the city council this week approved police use of facial recognition technology – reversing the trend of bans in cities from Oakland to Boston. Aurora’s officials insist the software will be used only to generate leads, not to make automatic arrests . But civil rights advocates remember why so many places outlawed facial recognition: it frequently misidentifies people of color and women . The ACLU warns that innocent Black and brown residents will be unfairly ensnared by false matches. Aurora’s decision, barely noted outside Colorado, could set a worrying precedent. It normalizes a tool that has repeatedly proven biased – a high-tech surveillance that just might tag you as a criminal if you simply “fit the profile.” Black Americans have enough histories of mistaken identity and over-policing; now the ghost in the machine may amplify those injustices in the name of public safety.

Not all the day’s revelations are bleak. In upstate New York, we actually saw a rare moment of accountability inside a prison system where brutality often goes unpunished. A jury convicted former correctional officer David Kingsley of murder in the fatal beating of inmate Robert Brooks, a 43-year-old Black man . Brooks died in December 2022 after multiple guards – mostly white – punched and kicked him while he lay shackled in a cell . Six other officers had already pleaded guilty in the case , and Governor Kathy Hochul was so appalled by the body-camera footage that she ordered sweeping reforms to a “rotten” prison culture. Still, at Kingsley’s trial two of his co-defendants were acquitted, a reminder of how elusive full justice can be. Watching the split verdict, Brooks’s son said the guilty officer and the ones who walked free were all “part of a rotten system, doing what state officials have allowed them to do” . One murderer will go to prison, but the systemic cruelty that killed Robert Brooks remains on life support. Without deeper change, it will claim more lives – indeed, just weeks after Brooks’s death, another young inmate was beaten to death by guards at a neighboring prison . The rot runs deep, and one conviction is not a cure.

And halfway around the world in Cameroon, another drama of power and protest is playing out, mostly unnoticed in U.S. media. Paul Biya, the 92-year-old president who has ruled Cameroon since 1982, is poised to secure an eighth term in office . As partial election results trickled in, opposition supporters took to the streets alleging fraud – only to be met with tear gas and mass arrests . More than 20 protesters in one city were detained and face charges of “incitement to rebellion,” to be tried by military tribunal . Imagine: a head of state approaching his hundredth birthday, clinging to power for over 43 years, crushing dissent so openly – yet the world hardly blinks. Global attention is elsewhere, and Biya’s crackdown slips under the wire. For Cameroonians and the African diaspora, it’s heartbreaking and familiar. An aging strongman using force to snuff out democratic hopes is the story of too many post-colonial nations. But when no superpower’s interests are at stake, it barely makes the news ticker. The silence is its own form of sanction, confirming to autocrats that brutality in the dark will be met with indifference.

If all these “blackout” stories share anything, it’s that they expose the chasm between appearance and reality in our society. Symbols of progress and equality are often just that – symbols – while underneath, the old injustices carry on. A Senate candidate can champion progressive values and also carry a Nazi-inspired tattoo unbeknownst to voters. A nation can celebrate record job numbers even as Black graduates are left behind. Lawmakers can preach democracy while gaming the system to erase Black votes. A government can tout law and order while unleashing agents who behave like an authoritarian secret police. We sing of freedom and fairness, yet in the shadows the hungry line up for food, the polluters poison with impunity, the cameras misidentify the innocent, and the prison walls echo with the cries of beaten men.

History presses its weight on these moments. After the Civil War, Reconstruction promised a new dawn of equality – but it was swiftly sabotaged when the country looked away. White supremacist symbols and tactics (not unlike a Totenkopf tattoo or a gerrymandered map) crept back into American life as the North grew weary of defending Black rights. It took nearly a century and a Second Reconstruction – the civil rights movement – to force those buried truths into open sight. And even then, progress came only inch by inch, against fierce resistance. James Baldwin once warned that “ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” We are living that warning again. Each of these stories is a lesson in what happens when we ignore the warnings at the margins. America is in one of its periodic battles over memory and power – a struggle to decide whose stories get heard and whose pain is recognized.

The parallels with earlier eras of “re-learning” are stark. We hear echoes of Jim Crow in Indiana’s attempt to dilute Black votes and in Aurora’s embrace of biased policing tech – new tools, old aims. We hear echoes of the civil-rights era in Baltimore’s church pantries feeding the hungry, reminiscent of the community survival programs of the 1960s when government safety nets failed Black families. We even hear the spirituals of the past – those blues and gospel laments – in the voices of people like Rev. Samuel comforting a woman ashamed to need free food, or Robert Brooks Jr. mourning his father while demanding change. They are carrying on a legacy of truth-telling. They refuse to let these stories stay buried.

Tonight, the mood is somber but not without resolve. The Liberty Blackout Brief exists to shine a little light where others won’t. It’s a reminder that the first step toward change is to see clearly. What we’ve seen today is hard to face – racism’s stubborn stains, power’s ugly manipulations, compassion stretched thin. But face it we must, or nothing will change. The question lingers like a final note from that old song, a plea rising from all the troubles left unseen: Will anyone know the trouble we’ve seen?

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